Sommari

TESOL-ITALY 34TH NATIONAL CONVENTION ‘Multiplying Voices’

Rome, November 20-21, 2009

Mario Papa – Janet Shelly

How video, music and acting enhance creativity

Learning takes place when classroom activities enhance students’ creativity and when the linguistic event is accompanied by a strong emotion. When we use music and prepare students for theatre performances, or watch films, the emotional part of students is strongly stirred and each student has the opportunity to develop his/her own creativity.

Mario Papa and Janet Shelly are teachers, teacher trainers and textbook writers. Most of their publications are well known in Italy and abroad.

TESOL-ITALY 30TH NATIONAL CONVENTION ‘A Fresh Start’

Univeristà di Roma, ‘La Sapienza’ – Facoltà di Ingegneria

November 23-24, 2005

Mario Papa – Janet Shelly

New ideas to develop listening and speaking skills

Generally teachers use classroom activities rarely discussing the psychological and pedagogical reasons behind their practical choices. Our talk concerns the results of the most recent research about interlanguage development. A theoretical discussion will be followed by some practical activities for the development of listening and speaking skills.

We want to draw the teachers’ attention to the extent to which second language learning often does not lead to success while first language, except in unusual cases, does. We have always been desperately searching for more effective methods which help students learn L2. Even in important conventions, teachers are generally shown a series of practical teaching activities but they are hardly ever exposed to the psychological and pedagogical reasons behind methodological choices. Our talk will focus on the importance of comprehensible input and comprehensible output to drive English as a foreign language development forward, giving our audience both results of research and practical classroom activities. We will highlight how interlanguage development is the by-product of engaging in meaning processing. both through comprehension, and through production.

At 21.30 tonight: A special after dinner evening: “Sing along to live music with Mario Papa and his friends”. All participants will sing famous British and American songs accompanied by Mario Papa on drums, Guido Cataldo on saxophone, Cosimo Palumbo on piano and Gennaro Carbone on bass guitar.

Improving students’ speaking skill remains one of the areas with the least brilliant results in terms of success.

We think that most of the reasons for the great difficulty in producing oral language are psychological: shyness, fear of speaking in front of others, etc. Speaking the foreign language in the classroom, with the teacher always subtly judging, provokes effects that are psychologically extremely negative and may create real emotional blocks in the students which can be very difficult to overcome.

We will talk about how acting and singing, for example short musicals performed as a group, can be of great help in overcoming the psychological problems involved in speaking.

Mario Papa and Janet Shelly are teachers, teacher trainers and textbook writers, with a large experience in the field of English language teaching and learning.

THE BRITISH COUNCIL NATIONAL CONFERENCE FOR TEACHERS OF ENGLISH

Acireale, Centro Congressi La Perla Ionica, 13-15 March 2003

Mario Papa – Janet Shelly

Improving oral skills through acting and singing

Improving students’ speaking skill remains one of the areas with the least brilliant results in terms of success. We think that most of the reasons for the great difficulty in producing oral language are psychological: shyness, fear of speaking in front of others, etc. Speaking the foreign language in the classroom, with the teacher always subtly judging, provokes effects that are psychologically extremely negative and may create real emotional blocks in the students which can be very difficult to overcome. We will talk about how acting and singing, for example short musicals performed as a group, can be of great help in overcoming the psychological problems involved in speaking. Then, a real class of about 20 students will come on the stage to perform a short musical of about 10 minutes. Further explanations of how a musical can be brought to life in any school will be given.

At 21.30 tonight: A special after dinner evening: “Sing along to live music with Mario Papa and his friends”. All participants will sing famous British and American songs accompanied by Mario Papa on drums, Guido Cataldo on saxophone, Cosimo Palumbo on piano and Gennaro Carbone on bass guitar.

Mario Papa and Janet Shelly are teachers, teacher trainers and textbook writers, with a large experience in the field of English language teaching and learning.

TESOL-ITALY XXV NATIONAL CONVENTION

Treasuring the Old, Challenging the New

Assisi, La Cittadella, December 1-2, 2000

Mario Papa – Janet Shelly

Developing a Teaching Unit for young learners

The talk will focus on the psychological and liguistic aspects of classroom activities. Numerous practical examples will be given. On the psychological level, classroom activities should activate all the senses, allow children to develop all the aspects of their personality and stimulate the children’s creativity. On the linguistic level, activities should be selected and organised according to what young students want and need to express.

At 20 tonight: A special after dinner: “Sing along with Mario Papa” – All participants will sing famous British and American songs accompanied by Mario Papa on piano.

M.Papa and J,Shelly are teachers, teacher trainers and textbook writers, with a large experience in the field of English language teaching and learning.

THE BRITISH COUNCIL CONFERENCE FOR TEACHERS OF ENGLISH

The Progetto Lingue 2000

Naples, The Royal Continental Hotel, 26-27 October 2000

Mario Papa – Janet Shelly

Creative activities for young learners

The talk will focus on the psychological and liguistic aspects of classroom activities. Numerous practical examples will be given which will include how to activate all the children’s senses on the psychological level with singing, moving around, participating and dramatizing. This allows children to develop all the aspects of their personalities and stimulate their creativity. On the linguistic level, we will look at ways of catering to the wants and needs of young students, providing vocabulary and structures relating to their world, presenting, reusing and expanding them in a cyclical way.

Mario Papa and Janet Shelly are teachers, teacher trainers and textbook writers, with a large experience in the field of English Language Teaching and Learning. Their books include, among the others, “New Communication Tasks”, Waypoints” and “Just Take Turns”.

THE BRITISH COUNCIL NATIONAL CONFERENCE

English Language Teaching

Bologna, Palazzo del Congressi, 23-25 March 2000

Mario Papa – Janet Shelly

Creative activities for young learners

The talk will focus on the psychological and linguistic aspects of classroom activities. Numerous practical examples will be given.

On the psychological level, classroom activities should:

- activate all the senses to get children completely involved; singing, moving

around, doing, and dramatizing are fundamental; but these kinds of

activities must be organized around a solid communicative syllabus;

- allow children to develop all the aspects – cognitive, emotional, social and

psychomotor - of their personality:

- stimulate the children’s creativity.

On the linguistic level, activities should:

- be selected and organised according to what young students want and need

to express;

- contain vocabulary and structures related to the children’s world; the

linguistic material should be presented, re-used and expanded un a cyclical

way;

- be constructed in such a way that there is always an information gap

between the students so that the activities are carried out in situations of real

communication.

At 20 tonight a special evening: Zanichelli Editore offers a special evening with dinner and music.

“Sing along with Mario Papa and his friends”. All participants will sing famous British and American songs accompanied by Mario Papa on drums, Cosimo Palumbo on piano and Gennaro Carbone on bass guitar.

Mario Papa and Janet Shelly are teachers, teacher trainers and textbook writers, with a large experience in the field of English language teaching and learning.

Guiding students to use the Internet in order to practise English outside the classroom is very important. Students will be exposed to different sources where English is not planned and where different variety of English are produced.. Suggestions on how to exploit the Internet and make a didactic use of songs and video will be given.

21.30 A special after dinner: “Sing along with Mario Papa and Mario Di Troia” – All participants will sing famous British and American songs accompanied by Mario Di Troia on piano and Mario Papa on drums.

Mario Papa is a teacher, teacher trainer and textbook writer. Mario Di troia is a teacher and teacher trainer. Both have worked in progetto Speciale Lingue Straniere for years.

THE BRITISH COUNCIL NATIONAL CONFERENCE

English language teaching

Palermo, 18 – 20 March 1999

Mario Papa – Janet Shelly

Use of CD-Rom in the English class

The workshop will involve the teachers in interactive use of the personal computer and video in the classroom with demonstrations using CD-Rom and how to exploit the Internet in the classroom. A discussion will follow in which we will underline not only the benefits students get from a cognitive point of view but also the benefits from the development of the emotional, affective and social levels of their personalities.

Demonstration of interactive activities with a CD-Rom plus a video will be shown. A discussion on the didactic, psycholinguistic and sociolinguistic implications of the use of the computer in the learning of English will follow.

At 20 tonight: A special after dinner: “Sing along with Mario Papa and Mario Di Troia” – All participants will sing famous British and American songs accompanied by Mario Di Troia on piano and Mario Papa on drums.

Mario Papa and Janet Shelly are both teachers, teacher trainers and textbook writers.

Evaluation is an important aspect of education, but it is not always interpreted correctly. Too often it is left to the intuition of individual teachers and it is generally confused with testing. This talk will deal with the fundamental assumptions of evaluation, particularly how to identify, at the beginning of each course of study, the dimensions of students’ personality, their initial preparation, enviromental influences on them, and the causes of all their different behaviours. Once all the elements concerning the cognitive, emotional, affective, social and physical aspects of each student in the class have been acquired, the school and the teachers can proceed with the general planning of the learning activities. All this is necessary for correct and complete evaluation.

Mario Papa is a textbook writer, teacher and teacher trainer based in Salerno, Italy.

30th TESOL ANNUAL CONVENTION

Chicago, Illinois, USA, 26 – 30 March 1996

Mario Papa

Creative activities for young learners

The talk will focus on the psychological and linguistic aspects of classroom activities. Numerous practical examples will be given.

On the psychological level, classroom activities should:

- activate all the senses to get children completely involved; singing, moving

around, doing, and dramatizing are fundamental; but these kinds of

activities must be organized around a solid communicative syllabus;

- allow children to develop all the aspects – cognitive, emotional, social and

psychomotor - of their personality:

- stimulate the children’s creativity.

On the linguistic level, activities should:

- be selected and organised according to what young students want and need

to express;

- contain vocabulary and structures related to the children’s world; the

linguistic material should be presented, re-used and expanded un a cyclical

way;

- be constructed in such a way that there is always an information gap

between the students so that the activities are carried out in situations of real

communication.

Mario Papa is a teacher, teacher trainer and textbook writer, with a large experience in the field of English language teaching and learning.

Language makes use both of verbal and visual signals for expression. It is especially because of this combination of sound and vision that video depicts real life language in real life situations so effectively. Moreover, video is a powerful and entertaining medium. Students can become active viewers in the class if video is used with appropriate activities which stimulate interaction and creativity, and generate students’ response and participation. The potential teaching possibilities offered by a video are enormous. Teachers can exploit a video not only by using the language contained in the dialogues but also in other ways. They can elicit language from visual elements, from the story, from the characters and their relationships, from the characters’ feelings, appearance, behaviour and gestures. In addition, they can focus on a variety of cultural elements present in the video.

During the talk video scenes will be shown and handouts will be given to present a series of activities on how to exploit a video programme.

Mario Papa and Janet Shelly are English teachers, teacher trainers and textbook writers.

TESOL-ITALY XX NATIONAL CONVENTION ‘Past into Future’

Rome, Hotel Parco dei Principi, November 10-11, 1995

Mario Papa – Janet Shelly

Interactive and creative use of video in an EFL class

Language makes use both of verbal and visual signals for expression. It is especially because of this combination of sound and vision that video depicts real life language in real life situations so effectively. Moreover, video is a powerful and entertaining medium. The potential teaching possibilities offered by a video are enormous. Teachers can exploit a video not only by using the language contained in the dialogues. They can elicit language from visual elements, from the story, from the characters and their relationships, from the characters’ feelings, appearance, behaviour and gestures, and they can focus on a variety of cultural elements. During the talk video scenes will be shown and handouts will be given to present a series of activities on how to exploit a video programme.

The speakers are English teachers, teacher trainers and textbook writers.

THE BRITISH COUNCIL NATIONAL CONFERENCE

English Language Teaching

Milano, 23-25 March 1995

Mario Papa – Janet Shelly

Interactive and creative use of video

Language makes use both of verbal and visual signals for expression. It is especially because of this combination of sound and vision that video depicts real life language in real life situations so effectively. Moreover, video is a powerful and entertaining medium. Students can become active viewers in the class if video is used with appropriate activities which stimulate interaction and creativity, and generate students’ response and participation. The potential teaching possibilities offered by a video are enormous. Teachers can exploit a video, not only by using the language contained in the dialogues but also in other ways. They can elicit language from visual elements, from the story, from the characters and their relationships, from the characters’ feelings, appearance, behaviour and gestures. In addition, they can focus on a variety of cultural elements present in th video. During the talk video scenes will be shown and handouts will be given to present a series of activities on how to exploit a video programme.

The speakers are English teachers, teacher trainers and textbook writers.

THE BRITISH COUNCIL NATIONAL CONFERENCE

English Language Teaching

Bologna, 14-16 April 1994

Mario Papa – Janet Shelly

Active learner contribution to English language learning

Traditional EFL classes give learners little chance for unplanned output:; output is usually limited to the formal classroom situation of “interrogazione”, or to answering teacher’s questions. This means that there is almost no room for the communicative and integrative functions of language to be practised inside the classroom – and certainly not outside it. This session will point out practical ways in which learners can be given the opportunity for real language production both in and out of class.

EFL teaching is traditionally based on a kind of “input” which is provided only by textbooks and, sometimes, by the teacher. As far as students’ “output” is concerned, it is limited to the formal classroom situation of “interrogazione” or, from time to time, to answering teacher’s questions. But research in the field has shown that learning takes place not only when students are exposed to a certain kind of “input”, but when they have the possibility to produce language, that is to produce their own “output”. The problem with EFL (English as a Foreign Language) learning is that the textbooks and the methodologies used are generally based on the research regarding ESL (English as a Second Language). However, in ESL the production of language outside the classroom, that is “unplanned” and often “ungrammatical output”, takes place automatically; students use English for both communicative and integrative functions. In EFL, instead, unplanned output is, in the best cases, limited to a few minutes in the classroom. It is practically non-existent out of the classroom. So in EFL, a fundamental element of language learning, that is the free production of language, is missing. To overcome this enormous problem, we have studied ways to give EFL students the opportunity to produce language not only in the classroom setting, but also outside the classroom. A series of activities of how this can be done are illustrated.

In these years we have discussed the notional functional programmes a lot, but we have sometimes forgotten the communicative methodology. The consequence is that we create sophisticated notional functional programmes, but we run the risk to use always teacher+centred techniques and not learner-centred techniques.

We have devised a series of communicative tasks at an elementary level where students have the chance to practise in pairs or in roups the linguistic material presented in a dialogue. The main characteristic of these activities is that there is always an information gap between the partners of a pair or the members of a group.

During the last fifteen years some aspects of the teaching-larning process have been neglected which deserve more detailed discussion. We refer to the teacher’s behaviour and to the teacher’s attitude towards the students and the subject he/she teaches,

In a field like ELT, where motivation has a primary role and is not always easy to find, the teacher’s beaviour and attitude may make an important contribution t the learning process.

The talk will discuss what helps learning and how teachers may contribute to create a favourable learning atmosphere.

The role of the “information gap” in the development of oral activities

In our classes students do not have too much time to practise the oral language they are studying. The teacher monopolizes the time by explaining grammar rules, giving examples, asking questions, etc.

Students have only a few minutes to answer the questions, and when they exercise the language in pairs or in groups they already know the answer, at least in their own language. For example: “What’s this?” “That’s a pen”, or “What are you doing? ““I’m writing”, where the student who aks the question can see that the other one is writing, so he/she already knows the answer! This kind of conversation does not occur in real life. In real life if you ask a question, you don’t generally know the answer.

Therefore, to give students more time to practise oral language in the classroom, it is advisable to carry out oral activities in pair (pair work), but these activities should have a particular characteristic: between the two students who form each pair there should always be an information gap. The information gap allows the students to carry out activities which are similar to the real situations of communication.

Mario Papa is a teacher, teacher trainer and textbook writer, with a large experience in the field of English language teaching and learning.

THE BRITISH COUNCIL NATIONAL CONFERENCE

Effective Teaching and Learning

Milano, Centro Congressi Quark, 13h – 15h April 1989

Mario Papa

Teacher-class relationships: psychological considerations

Many aspects of the teaching-learning process have been discussed

during the last ten, fifteen years: aspects such as methods, textbooks, students and teachers.

There is one aspect which has been neglected and probably deserves more detailed discussion: the aspect which concerns the teacher-student relationship.

In a field where motivation has a primary role, ELT, the teacher’s attitude may give an important contribution to the learning process.

The talk will discuss what teachers may presumably expect from their learners and what these learners may realistically give.

New ideas in Foreign Language Teaching sometimes generate confusion among EFL teachers as well as poor results with students. The talk will discuss in particular the application of recent methodological issues in textbooks and some classroom techniques used to achieve communicative goals effectively.

In these years we have discussed the notional functional programmes a lot, but we have sometimes forgotten the communicative methodology. The consequence is that we create sophisticated notional functional programmes, but we run the risk to use always teacher+centred techniques and not learner-centred techniques.

We have devised a series of communicative tasks at an elementary level where students have the chance to practise in pairs or in roups the linguistic material presented in a dialogue. The main characteristic of these activities is that there is always an information gap between the partners of a pair or the members of a group.

Most people who work in the field of ELT nowadays agree that pupils’ motivation and interest are essential to learning. Therefore, rather than discuss this point any longer, I think it would be better to talk of a particular kind ol material which is often neglected by most teachers but offers a splendid opportunity to stimulate the interest of pupils: songs. As a matter of fact, songs are materials that reflect young people’s concerns. They represent the kind of material that pupils want to learn. Through songs it is possible to introduce a considerable part of the youngsters’ world into the classroom and to establish friendly relations with pupils. Moreover, songs provide an amusing and relaxing break in the usual routine of classroom activity. Singing is certainly one of the activities which generates enthusiasm.

During the talk practical suggestions on how to introduce songs in the classroom will be given.